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11 - 3L1 Acquisition

Three First Languages during Early Childhood

from Part III - Becoming and Staying Multilingual at Different Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

By
Tanja Kupisch
Edited by
Jennifer Cabrelli ,
Adel Chaouch-Orozco ,
Jorge González Alonso ,
Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares ,
Eloi Puig-Mayenco  and
Jason Rothman
Jennifer Cabrelli
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Adel Chaouch-Orozco
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Jorge González Alonso
Affiliation:
Universidad Nebrija, Spain and UiT, Arctic University of Norway
Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Eloi Puig-Mayenco
Affiliation:
King's College London
Jason Rothman
Affiliation:
UiT, Arctic University of Norway and Universidad Nebrija, Spain
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Summary

This chapter is concerned with 3L1 acquisition (early trilingualism; i.e., the development of three languages during early childhood). This is a methodologically challenging and understudied topic, most typically focussing on children with two home languages that are both different from the language of the wider community. The available research on lexicon, syntax, and phonology shows that trilinguals can develop three languages at once in essentially the same way as monolingual and bilingual children do, with language-specific patterns in each of them. However, the languages interact and the additional language (compared to bilingual acquisition) complicates this interaction. I discuss whether and how early trilingualism and early bilingualism differ, and what the roles of language experience and typological distance are. More than any other setting, early trilingualism shows that children can acquire complex linguistic properties with substantially reduced exposure from a very young age. However, maintenance of all three languages is an issue, which mirrors findings on bilingual (heritage) speakers.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition , pp. 271 - 294
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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